Atlas's Bones: The African Foundations of Europe

About the Book

A major new look at Africa's influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.

Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas's Bones, D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil's Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.

Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false "medieval" version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, "Reading Africa," traces Egypt's, Libya's, and Carthage's influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, "Writing Africa," focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.

Atlas's Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world.

Table of Contents:
Preface: An Atlas for This Book
Introduction
African History and White Noise  1
“Africa,” the Fallout of Metonymy  00
All of Africa  00

I. Ancient and Medieval: Reading Africa
Chapter One. Egypt, the Exception
   Africa, the Continent  00
   Alexander the Great African  00
   The Libyan God of Europe  00
   The Fluid Land  00
   Egypt in Medieval Europe  00
   Moses the African  00
   Alexander’s African Romance  00
   Egyptology’s History of Europe  00
   Egypt Theory  00
Chapter Two. Africa, Fulcrum of Epic
   Mythic Landing: The Iliad, the Argonautica, the Pharsalia, the Aeneid  00
   Britain’s African Foundations: Geoffrey of Monmouth  00
   The African Invention of England  00
Chapter Three. The Specter of Carthage
   Carthage the Symptom: Virgil, Silius Italicus, Horace, Freud  00
   Carthage and African Identities: Sallust, Tertullian, Augustine  00
   Augustine’s Scandalous Carthaginian Theory  00
   The Dream of Scipio Africanus: Cicero and Macrobius  00
   Petrarch’s Modern Africa  00
   Chaucer and the African  00
Chapter Four. Ghosts of Language: Punic, Lybic, African Myth
   The African Tumor in Language  00
   Martianus Capella: In the Palace of Myth  00
   Fulgentius: Africa’s Mythic Language  00
   Libyc, the Purest Language  00
   The Symbolic Violence of Lost Languages: Bourdieu  00
   Our Most Secret Writing: Assia Djebar  00

II. Medieval and Modern: Writing Africa
Chapter Five. Allegory of Two African Cities
   Auerbach in Alexandria  00
   Auerbach in Carthage  00
Chapter Six. The King’s African Bodies
   Kantorowicz’s African Body  00
   Mystical Kings, European and African  00
   Anthropology’s Divine Kings and Colonial Rule: Leo Frobenius and Max Gluckman  00
Chapter Seven. Kenya’s Medieval Charter
   The Feudal Metaphor  00
   Medieval Land Law in Africa  00
   How Oxford Medievalists Ruled the World  00
   Independent Feudalism  00
   Kenyatta and Malinowski Imagine Land  00
   Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Land before Time  00
Chapter Eight Fanon Outside History: Manicheism, Augustine, and Hegel
   Which Manicheism?  00
   Manicheism and Dialectic  00
   Struggling with Augustine, Then and Now  00
Chapter Nine Zimbabwe and the Fear of the Medieval
   The Specter of Carthage, Again  00
   Picturesque Archaeology  00
   Barbarian Invasions: Rhodes’s Gibbon  00
   The Inconvenience of the Medieval  00
Coda The New Divine Kings
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author :
D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review :
“A fascinating exploration of the place of Africa and Africans in the intellectual life of classical Europe, its later erasure, and some of the consequences in the making of the cultures of Empire.” “Smith finds that medieval European literature relies on knowledge of a real (not just a mythic) Africa and writings by Africans, and his invitation to reorient our understanding of the relationship between continents is both provocative and persuasive. His compelling challenge to the use of a false ‘medieval’ to support racial hierarchies and conquest is important for historians, literary scholars, and everyone seeking to better understand the world as it was and as it is.” “This brilliant book affirms that Africa has never been alien to Europe. European self-understanding has always depended upon its southern neighbor, and yet Europe has regarded Africa as a place perennially medieval, in need of neo-feudal law, and incapable of comprehending modernity. Smith expertly guides us through this tangled web of mutual indebtedness and pseudo-feudal mystification. A landmark achievement.” “We live in an exciting historical moment in medievalist scholarship. While two decades ago Euromedievalists hardly noticed the vast world outside Latin Christendom, an increasing number of scholarly studies today are unearthing the crucial debts that Euromedieval literature, history, and thought owe to Afro-Asian worlds. Atlas’s Bones, in particular, treating literary history, philosophy, and medievalism through nine expansive chapters, will surely be one of the new studies that will be read for a long time.”